This is not a mommy blog...
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If you know me, then you probably already know that I have a two month old child. You probably also know that I have returned to school to get my masters degree in english...not really with the goal of teaching in mind, or any goal really for that matter. I went back to school because I just felt that I wasn't done learning yet. It took a semester long identity crisis and getting pregnant with my first child to realize that.
I bring these things up because I want my blogging intentions to be loud and clear. Maybe this is an attempt to define them more clearly for myself...who knows? The point is that there is no way the influence of my new motherhood won't permeate my writing. Having a child is like nothing else I could have imagined in the way it effects your sense of yourself. The second they handed me that baby, everything I knew about myself shifted, and through the past two months, I have been trying to navigate the new terrain of my life. It isn't just about getting used to poopy diapers and midnight feedings and hour long crying spells (his and mine), although these things do call for quite the adjustment, let me tell you. What I mean is that, now that the title of "mom" is permanently stamped onto my soul, I have to figure out where everything else that I was before I was mom now fits. Who am I? That question always seems to be answered in bits and pieces for me through writing. The most important thing I've learned: I am in a constant metamorphasis...and if I'm not, if I'm not changing and not growing, then I'm not happy. But, I digress...
What I don't want is for this to turn into a "mommy blog", and here's why: it is a mistake for me to define myself in terms of my relationships with others...I think it is a mistake for all of us, and yet so many of us do it all the time. In order to fully explain this, I think I should tell you how I came to be a mother...but then, back to discussion time, where I'm sure the topic of my motherhood will occaisionally intrude but should never be this blogs sole subject.
I have wanted to be a mom for a long time, perhaps since my first semester of college, at which time I believe my real growth as an individual began. When I say that I wanted to be a mom, don't mistake that for the phrase 'I wanted to have a baby'. What I began to desire through the process of my intellectual development was a private forum within which I could be exactly who I wanted to be...a place where my beliefs would matter, and my intentions would be pure and powerful. I wanted to create something...or rather, I wanted to create someone. Please don't mistake this desire for a god-complex or something. What I mean is that, through my own process of becoming, I wanted to help somebody else become, and see what came of it. I think that is the root of the real desire to become parents in all of us. We want to see if we will be good at it...we believe we will be good at it. Some people think the desire to become a parent is a primal instinct, a result of hormones that are intended to initiate species survival. Maybe so...but I think there's something intellectual at work there, too...something spiritual, really. It helps that I have been in a stable, commited relationship for a very long time. When you are in the most societally acceptable position to become a mother, there really isn't anything or anyone stopping you. Everybody wants a new baby around. So, I checked a few things off my to-do list: graduate college, move closer to my family, buy a house...check, check, check....and a year later, I was pregnant. I really don't have the words to describe being pregnant...perhaps I will tackle this subject in a later blog. But I can say that it is a very spiritual process. It was the first time I felt really connected to my own body, the first time I was really able to love and appreciate my body for what it could do. A few months later, there I was with a little person in my arms, and a new sense of pressure and responsibility on my shoulders that I could never have tried to imagine.
If I'm honest, I have to say that I've spent the last eight weeks running around like a chicken with my head cut off...jumping from one chore to the next: preparing for the next cycle of eating, sleeping, and pooping, getting a few household jobs done between these cycles, trying to get done as much of the mountain of homework I've had that is humanly possible. I've lost my real sense of myself, pushing that person aside to fulfill the roles of mother, wife, student. And, I'm starting to see the trouble there. If I want to be a good mother, or a good anything else for that matter, I'm going to have to make sure that I don't start defining myself simply as "mother." I am still Jordan...just Jordan. Just a person who is always becoming. I am now also a mother, and, although it's hard not to, I don't have to feel guilty about wanting to define myself first as me, and then as my son's mother, my husband's wife, my mother's daughter...etc. I have learned that the real person I am creating here is myself, and that my job as a mother is not to create my son, but to help him learn how to create himself.
So the writing in this blog is aimed at my own self creation and nothing more. I am a million different things, and I hope one day my son will find in himself a million different things. I hope he is indefinable. I hope he doesn't waste his time trying to fulfill the roles that the world thinks he should in the ways that the world thinks he should. I hope he will learn that if he just works hard to be always becoming himself, then he will be the best son, the best father, the best friend, the best person he could ever possibly be.
I bring these things up because I want my blogging intentions to be loud and clear. Maybe this is an attempt to define them more clearly for myself...who knows? The point is that there is no way the influence of my new motherhood won't permeate my writing. Having a child is like nothing else I could have imagined in the way it effects your sense of yourself. The second they handed me that baby, everything I knew about myself shifted, and through the past two months, I have been trying to navigate the new terrain of my life. It isn't just about getting used to poopy diapers and midnight feedings and hour long crying spells (his and mine), although these things do call for quite the adjustment, let me tell you. What I mean is that, now that the title of "mom" is permanently stamped onto my soul, I have to figure out where everything else that I was before I was mom now fits. Who am I? That question always seems to be answered in bits and pieces for me through writing. The most important thing I've learned: I am in a constant metamorphasis...and if I'm not, if I'm not changing and not growing, then I'm not happy. But, I digress...
What I don't want is for this to turn into a "mommy blog", and here's why: it is a mistake for me to define myself in terms of my relationships with others...I think it is a mistake for all of us, and yet so many of us do it all the time. In order to fully explain this, I think I should tell you how I came to be a mother...but then, back to discussion time, where I'm sure the topic of my motherhood will occaisionally intrude but should never be this blogs sole subject.
I have wanted to be a mom for a long time, perhaps since my first semester of college, at which time I believe my real growth as an individual began. When I say that I wanted to be a mom, don't mistake that for the phrase 'I wanted to have a baby'. What I began to desire through the process of my intellectual development was a private forum within which I could be exactly who I wanted to be...a place where my beliefs would matter, and my intentions would be pure and powerful. I wanted to create something...or rather, I wanted to create someone. Please don't mistake this desire for a god-complex or something. What I mean is that, through my own process of becoming, I wanted to help somebody else become, and see what came of it. I think that is the root of the real desire to become parents in all of us. We want to see if we will be good at it...we believe we will be good at it. Some people think the desire to become a parent is a primal instinct, a result of hormones that are intended to initiate species survival. Maybe so...but I think there's something intellectual at work there, too...something spiritual, really. It helps that I have been in a stable, commited relationship for a very long time. When you are in the most societally acceptable position to become a mother, there really isn't anything or anyone stopping you. Everybody wants a new baby around. So, I checked a few things off my to-do list: graduate college, move closer to my family, buy a house...check, check, check....and a year later, I was pregnant. I really don't have the words to describe being pregnant...perhaps I will tackle this subject in a later blog. But I can say that it is a very spiritual process. It was the first time I felt really connected to my own body, the first time I was really able to love and appreciate my body for what it could do. A few months later, there I was with a little person in my arms, and a new sense of pressure and responsibility on my shoulders that I could never have tried to imagine.
If I'm honest, I have to say that I've spent the last eight weeks running around like a chicken with my head cut off...jumping from one chore to the next: preparing for the next cycle of eating, sleeping, and pooping, getting a few household jobs done between these cycles, trying to get done as much of the mountain of homework I've had that is humanly possible. I've lost my real sense of myself, pushing that person aside to fulfill the roles of mother, wife, student. And, I'm starting to see the trouble there. If I want to be a good mother, or a good anything else for that matter, I'm going to have to make sure that I don't start defining myself simply as "mother." I am still Jordan...just Jordan. Just a person who is always becoming. I am now also a mother, and, although it's hard not to, I don't have to feel guilty about wanting to define myself first as me, and then as my son's mother, my husband's wife, my mother's daughter...etc. I have learned that the real person I am creating here is myself, and that my job as a mother is not to create my son, but to help him learn how to create himself.
So the writing in this blog is aimed at my own self creation and nothing more. I am a million different things, and I hope one day my son will find in himself a million different things. I hope he is indefinable. I hope he doesn't waste his time trying to fulfill the roles that the world thinks he should in the ways that the world thinks he should. I hope he will learn that if he just works hard to be always becoming himself, then he will be the best son, the best father, the best friend, the best person he could ever possibly be.
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1 comment:
You are an excellent Jordan. :o)
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